One thing that works remarkably well in Scientology…

Most people are able to curtail their issues if they are motivated to do so.

You can suppress your compulsions, suspend your anger, curtail your depression and put your mental anguish on hold… if you know there is a solution up the road. Just keep walking a bit further and it will get handled. Just a mile up the road. Across that Bridge. Over on the other side. A bit further. Almost there. Just hold on for a tad longer. Etc.

I have met scores of Scientologists who have had this going, and remarkably well – for years. They have this big issue in life that they want to have handled. And they believe Scientology can handle it. They start out on the Communication course, and while they get good gains on the exercises, that pressing issue is not gone. They do the Grades. Excellent gains, but the problem remains. They become Clear. Issue still there. They embark upon the OT levels. Cool gains, but that mental burden, while thoroughly covered by hope of some future resolution, is still there. Nagging.

This suspension of shit is a real gain in the person’s life. While it is indeed temporary, it is nevertheless real. The person’s life quality can be substantially increased for years. And that is one great thing that Scientology can do for people.

But for this to work, the person must believe that the issue can be solved by Scientology. And for the person to believe, the solution must be at least as complex as the problem he is facing. Brushing the problem off with “just don’t create it” or “learn to not give a flying fuck about it” just won’t cut it – if the person cherish his problem too much. He will need a complex, substantial and “real” solution. Something scientific looking, something complex like Scientology. With steps and levels and processes, procedures, frameworks, methodology and terminology and organizations and graphs and charts, expensive and exclusive, and with lots of neat looking marketing. Yeah, that should cut it.

It’s only when the person completes or quits Scientology – and still have that issue – that the bear wakes up from hibernation and charges ferociously back into his life. This is why some people experience a great loss when they quit Scientology or when they complete the Bridge (to “Total Freedom”).

The flip side of this coin is really that suspending the mental issue with hope of resolution is an abandonment of responsibility. Instead of taking full responsibility for the problem, he assigns the resolution over to “future Scientology”. And then he’s stuck with the issue even though it is suspended.

Totally. Severe depressions, legs shaking when the person is near many people, psychotic breaks, alcoholism, cumpulsive thoughts (severe), sexual compulsions, suicidal attempts, lack of accomplishments in life, lack of self esteem just to name a few. And these are all different people.

Those are all close acquaintances of mine. I could add “violent behavior” and “inclination to rape” to that list. And then there are the many accounts published on the Net in addition to the public figures I know personally such as Silvia Kusada and Jason Beghe. There are so many. It breaks my heart just to think of the list.

Wow. I finally understand you. I haven’t been able to make head or tails of your incessant defence of Scientology and Hubbard. But now I finally get it. And I don’t mean this in a snide, sarcastic or unsincere way. I finally get why you come to the defence of the subject at every turn. Because you haven’t actually seen the dark side of Scientology. You haven’t seen that woman who after 500 hours of high class auditing still can’t stand when others come close to her. Her legs starts shaking and she falls over. She’s been to Flag, to AOs to field auditors, to all kinds of ethics handlings. But it only gets worse. And it turned on during NED. And then there is this guy who totally flipped around Clear and then has been in and out of psychiatric institutions all the years after that. You haven’t seen the damage that Scientology can do. To you Scientology is All Good. No wonder you defend it. I would too. But I have seen the flip side. I have seen the drug abuse, the alcohol abuse, the violence and the perversions. To me Scientology is both Good and Bad. I have personally had tremendous gains. But I recognize that for many it wasn’t so. To some it was even crippling. And therefore I can relate to the many online accounts of people I do not personally know – because they parallel the people I DO know. Scientology is a mixed bag to me. Both Good and Bad.

Anyways, thank you for sharing this. It lightened my day. I get you now.

It’s not that I haven’t seen some of this kind of thing, but in the blog post you presented it as a “big issue in life that they want to have handled. And they believe Scientology can handle it. They start out on the Communication course . . .” etc. So I got the idea that you were talking about people who came into Scientology with a big issue that never got handled – scores of people you said. I don’t believe that was the case for very many.

Anyway, you have apparently seen more people of the type you describe above than I have.

When you only see “some of this kind of thing” you can rightfully think that it is due to statistical “bumps”/noise or misapplications and human errors. But when you see many severe cases, then it can be concluded that there are some deeper causes. In the tech itself. Some very deep causes.

In a comment above you wrote “It breaks my heart just to think of the list,” and I was thinking about a couple things that might make you feel better about the unfairness of it all.

For one thing, I don’t think anybody has done an objective scientific study of those scores of “failed cases” you know of – especially a study overseen by an expert in the tech. Jason Beghe was one person you named, for example, but in a blog post Marty wrote a few years ago, he stated that “Jason went through ten years of the most vicious Black Dianetics within RCS (Radical Corporate Scientology).”

Similarly, you mentioned that people on your list had been to the top orgs, AO’s and Flag. However, as with Jason, this is no guarantee whatsoever that they did not get out-tech.

The other thing I wanted to point out is that things like “lack of accomplishments in life,” as you put it, may have more to do with the pc than with the tech. Here’s an excerpt from *Science of Survival*, the chapter titled “Persistence on a Given Course”:

“An individual may be known by his persistence. But this index is not a sharply defined one, since there are, evidently, two types of personalities in general or, one might even say, two types of mental structure.

“The persistent individual who normally carries forward toward his goal despite environmental suppressors and deviators, in the absence of processing and during the normal course of life, because of the dwindling spiral, will drop down the tone scale. More of his free theta will become enturbulated and the balance will gradually shift until, most likely, there is far more enturbulated theta than free theta. The persistence of this individual may continue, but the methods he uses to gain his goal will match the various points on the tone scale on the way down. . . .

“The individual who has a low theta endowment and seems structurally incapable of concentration when at a low point on the tone scale, may yet increase his persistence to the point where he can win the minor goals of life with great ease when he has been released or Cleared.”

“Trying to explain away so many cases at so many levels as ‘out tech’ is actually cruel as it makes real reasons why they failed.”

Apparently you had no argument to counter what I wrote. Instead, you resorted to an Appeal to Emotion – a logical fallacy – by labeling it “cruel.”

At least I gave some valid possibilities for what could have occurred. You were the one who “tried to explain away so many cases” by giving them all a blanket evaluation of the tech being to blame, without offering any support for such a conclusion and generalization – otherwise known as Hasty Generalization, another logical fallacy.

As I’ve indicated, it is both illogical and unscientific to draw such a conclusion when you don’t know all the variables. This isn’t like you and I can only imagine that you are too emotionally involved.

Oh, Straw Man. I am not saying that all these cases are because of the Tech. Please read what I wrote again.

What I AM saying is that it is highly unlikely that ALL those cars were due to out tech or some such, and that so many cases should warrant a serious look into what might be wrong with the core of Scientology.

Yes, there are very good grounds to believe there are SOME deeper causes. But that does not necessarily cover all those cases or all of the Tech or any such hasty generalizations. But to believe there could not be any deeper causes in the tech that could explain at least some of these is of course ridiculous as you would probably agree.

As for Jason Beghe, I know quite well what he went through after talking with him for hours about it.

The use of “Black Dianetics” or “Black Scientology” is often used as a defense of the Tech. Just like the defense of, “but that wasn’t STANDARD tech”. More often than not this is a fallacy. It’s called “the No True Scotsman fallacy” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman).

Another thing to note about Jason, if I remember right, is that he said Scientology could be fixed with Scientology. That implies that he differentiated between what he got and what Scientology actually is.

I’m talking about what he described happened to him after he disagreed that he should have to pay again for his Academy Levels. when it was the church that delivered the (supposedly) error-filled courses.

Ah, but there are many more issues Jason had with Scientology than that. But this is getting into details of our conversations. Let’s just leave it with Jason being but one example of Scientology not delivering to him his goals WHILE he at the same time jollied on as a “happy” Scientologist fooling both C/S’es, auditors and the rest of crews and himself – while thinking it will one day get solved. And that returns is to the OP.

Nevertheless, I am pretty sure he did say that Scientology can be fixed WITH Scientology. That tells me what he thinks of actual Scientology, as opposed to what the CoS has been delivering for many years – probably most of the years Jason was involved.

“That resonated as truth to me. It served to inform my decision to devote my attention to solving problems created by Scientology with Scientology. I decided that the manner in which he and I used certain Scientology tools was how they were intended to be used upon their creation. I recognized that there were probably more people in the world by several multiples, who had experienced misuse of those tools and had left the increasingly corporatized churches of Scientology than there were of those who remained. I decided that I had a right, even a duty, to try to do what I could for that majority.”

“Since Jason’s visit close to one hundred former members of the church of Scientology have sojourned to our home to resolve their Scientology experiences. The vast majority of them leave here still considering themselves Scientologists, and better ones than they were when they arrived. A smaller part of that majority continue on with their pursuit of higher levels of Scientology counseling and studies. A minority of those visitors consider that they have put Scientology behind them in a positive sense. That is to say, they are no longer struggling with and resisting memories of their pasts. They have reconciled them, and consider their Scientology experiences part of their own personal development – retaining positives and considering negatives as part of life’s learning process.”

I don’t doubt any of the horror stories I have read on the blogs, especially for people in the SP or on the upper levels and especially at Flag. But like Marildi, I I haven’t seen a lot of this phenomenon. Not expressed anyway. I was in for 35 years (1970 – 2006) and this included 11 years as an Org C/S, so I’ve seen many thousands of sessions, many hundreds of pcs. BUT .. of course they were people who were getting auditing and having wins, so they weren’t mentioning things that weren’t handled (may be different at Flag for HGC pcs)

On the other hand, with all the wins I did have, I can’t say that I ever achieved one of my own main goals on my case, probably the most important goal, which was to feel ABSOLUTELY certain about surviving as a being after body death and feeling just fine and even cheerful about that whole area. And it doesn’t look like that is truly addressed even on OT8.

Now, there are several reasons why certain main goals are never mentioned by a Scientologist: It is berated as “a hidden standard”, it can get you to do expensive Quality handlings, it can get you in a lengthy stay at the Ethics Officer, it will create “bad PR” for you personally in the Org. And because of these, you may start wondering, “what’s wrong with me”, and so it’s better to simply suppress that issue and move on. “It will probably be handled on some level up the Bridge”. And so it goes. But as with your goal, many such issues are never handled in Scientology, no matter how many people may cry, “but you haven’t gotten proper 100% STANDARD tech.

I can assure you that OT8 will not get you that certainty about death. I have done my own research into that area and will post on that later under the title, “Learning to die”.

And, those fallacies – Scientology is rife with fallacies such as Ad Homs, Straw Man and No True Scotsman. I should make a post on that too.

Here we have a former C/S who oversaw hundreds of pcs and thousands of sessions, and yet he “hasn’t seen a lot” of the horror stories. He obviously is in a position to be a better judge than the pcs who claim, even sincerely, that they got standard tech.

Btw, Joe, is the goal you had and didn’t achieve accomplished in ANY path? I really don’t think so.

That same question could also be applied to others who didn’t achieve a particular goal.

“The flip side of this coin is really that suspending the mental issue with hope of resolution is an abandonment of responsibility. Instead of taking full responsibility for the problem, he assigns the resolution over to “future Scientology”. And then he’s stuck with the issue even though it is suspended.”

I did this for real until at wit’s end decided to solo audit over the top of orders from Scientology that I must never ever try this. That was an important turning point for me. Hubbard helped me keep this hypnotic suggestion in place with the use of his “hidden standard” definition which is “something which must be seen to happen before one can say that Scientology works.” This was utterly effective to keep me examining the results of Scientology with a critical eye. Genius.

Some out-Scientologists continue to believe in Scientology and maintain this bar-from-looking of Hubbard’s simply because it is his policy that we continue to “not look.”

Geir: “The flip side of this coin is really that suspending the mental issue with hope of resolution is an abandonment of responsibility. Instead of taking full responsibility for the problem, he assigns the resolution over to “future Scientology”. And then he’s stuck with the issue even though it is suspended.”

How is one to take full responsibility for the problem?

Marildi: “Here we have a former C/S who oversaw hundreds of pcs and thousands of sessions, and yet he “hasn’t seen a lot” of the horror stories. He obviously is in a position to be a better judge than the pcs who claim, even sincerely, that they got standard tech.

Btw, Joe, is the goal you had and didn’t achieve accomplished in ANY path? I really don’t think so.”

I disagree. I believe it is possible to come to a “feeling ABSOLUTELY certain about surviving as a being after body death and feeling just fine and even cheerful about that whole area.” As a possible route to that one could do the Monroe Institute’s Gateway program and learn to travel OBE and into other (“astral”) realms sufficiently well to accustom themselves with the fact that they are not a body and that when they die it will be just fine.

You conveniently omitted what Joe said: “BUT .. of course they were people who were getting auditing and having wins, so they weren’t mentioning things that weren’t handled ”

In scn you are indoctrinated/trained to believe that your “issue/problem” if not handled, will be handled somewhere along the line.

The only place on the “Bridge” where “wants handled” is specifically addressed in on NED and this is done fairly late on the NED program. Why is it significant that it is late in the program? Because a person is likely to be feeling quite fine at that point and less inclined to have their attention on such things and might well consider they are resolved. Only after you get back out in life do these nagging issues come back to light.

In my own case I bought hours and went to FLAG to handle a specific issue. Was it addressed? NO. Ignored entirely. Instead the C/S deemed that what I needed was to get on with OT Preps.

This is quite common. What the PC wants handled is not part of standard C/Sing. Standard C/Sing means to take that person up the grade chart step by step. If the issue the person wants handled is not getting in the way of doing the next grade then the next grade is what they’re going to get.

I’m not saying the tech couldn’t be applied to address a person’s issues, but that it routinely is not used to do so. This is in stark contrast to something like Idenics where what the person is interested in handling is the ONLY thing that is taken up.

freebeeing: “I believe it is possible to come to a ‘feeling ABSOLUTELY certain about surviving as a being after body death and feeling just fine and even cheerful about that whole area.’ As a possible route…”

What I meant by my question was whether there was a path that achieved that goal as a routine outcome for everybody – and I don’t believe there is. Scientology auditing has achieved it for some people, and thus it too is ” a possible route” – as much any other and perhaps more so than most, for all we know.

I agree with the rest of your post, including this:

“I’m not saying the tech couldn’t be applied to address a person’s issues, but that it routinely is not used to do so.”

My basic view of the tech is not that it should be utilized the way the CoS has done but that it has the potential to accomplish more than most other paths in terms of a majority of people. At least that is my impression, and even with all the qualifications I included in that sentence, it’s still a strong recommendation.

As for the goal Joe described, my idea is that a fully trained C/S could write a program that would result in his total satisfaction. I myself am not a trained C/S but I wouldn’t doubt if even an 18-button prepcheck would be enough.

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